You know those movies that make you laugh more out of pity than amusement? Finding North will be lucky if it elicits that much emotion from audiences. Even if you have a "Wait-For-It-To-Come-Out-On-Video" List, don't bother saving a space for Director Tanya Wexler's debut.

In the opening scene, Wendy Makkena (Sister Act, Air Bud) stars as Rhonda Portelli, a young woman who becomes infatuated with a naked man she sees about to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. Unfortunately, Travis Furlong, played by John Benjamin Hickey (The General's Daugher, Love! Valour! Compassion!), doesn't take this plunge and save us from the next hour and a half.

More empty and lifeless than the zombies that overrunits banal B-movie post-apocalypse, "Land of the Dead" may bethe return of George A. Romero to the genre he created, but there's littleto distinguish this film from the countless gory imitators the writer-director'swork has spawned.

The fourth picture in Romero's "Dead" series,it takes place in a decimated world where a handful of rich elitists livein a self-contained, weakly defended luxury skyscraper and a lower classof humanity scrapes by in the streets behind protective walls and electricfences. But unbeknownst to all of them, the zombies in the wasteland outsidehave begun to think and organize.

This sounds like a fantastic -- and wholly original --concept that could take the genre to a scarier new level. But "Landof the Dead" fails to exploit the refreshing plot point any furtherthan is necessary to bring the undead through the city's pathetic ramparts,led by the moaning-groaning influence of a single zombie who has developeda primitive ability to reason.

The movie has nothing new to offer, although it is madea tad more watchable by something old -- Romero's simple, straightforwardcinematography that makes all the action (especially the mediocre scares)much clearer and eerily more immediate than the shake-shake, chop-chopstyle applied to most modern horror flicks. Its other great asset is thebody-decay makeup on the legions of walking corpses and the dead staresand lumbering gaits of some of the key zombie actors.